Saskia's Journey

by Theresa Breslin

  ‘I hated it,’ said her father. ‘The dark poky little rooms, the stink of fish, the noise, ships hooting, foghorns blasting away, boats coming and going at all hours of the morning, and the absolute dire greyness of it all. It’s why I don’t understand how she’ – and he jabbed his finger at Saskia – ‘is so fascinated by the sea. It’s cold and cruel and takes lives winter after winter after winter, men dying, women weeping. As well as being widowed by it, my mother lost four brothers.’

  ‘There’s no need to carry on so.’ Saskia’s mother had picked up an emery board and began to file her nails. ‘That’s all in the past.’

  ‘No it’s not in the past!’ her father had roared. ‘Where do you think the fish comes from that arrives on your plate? Your lemon sole, your baby codling, or prawn cocktails? When you and your figure-conscious friends lunch together they often choose fish, don’t they? It’s a low-calorie meal for weight-obsessed females.’

  ‘Yes, darling, but it’s not actually our fault that fishermen have a dangerous occupation.’ Her mother raised her eyes to the ceiling and said in a bored, amused voice, ‘You have this habit of trying to make someone else feel guilty for your emotional hang-ups. By eating fish you could say that weight-watchers everywhere are actually keeping all those people in a job.’

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  ‘I wasn’t laughing. Did you see me laughing? Saskia?’ Her mother had turned to her. ‘Was I laughing?’

  Saskia had crept from the room as the argument escalated.

  As she and Alessandra ate dinner together that night, Saskia decided to probe a little into her own family history.

  ‘Would you tell me about my grandfather, Alessandra?’

  ‘Rob?’ Alessandra said the word slowly, holding her brother’s name in her mouth for a moment.

  Saskia waited.

  Alessandra sighed. ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘Anything,’ said Saskia. ‘What he looked like, what life was like growing up here. Anything at all.’

  ‘Och, but he was a bonnie boy,’ said Alessandra. ‘He was two years older than me. A kind brother who grew to be a big handsome fisherlad. We both worked at the fishing from when we were small and he went to sea at fourteen. My father kept creels for partans and lobster, and in the winter Rob went line fishing inshore. He always brought in the best fish. He told me that he found the mark by using Cliff House as his reference point when sailing out.

  ‘That’s how he knew where to fish?’ asked Saskia.

  Alessandra nodded. ‘I’d collect mussels among the rocks and bait the lines for him. It was wartime and the deep-sea fishing was restricted, although some boats did go out. The Royal Navy was sent to protect them but they had enough on their hands trying to guard the merchant convoys across the Atlantic. Then after the war, when the season began, Rob went with the other young lads to follow the herring. I remember sitting in front of the house with the bone needles, mending his net. Each fisherman brought his own net to the boat. But I wasn’t allowed to go with him to the harbour the way the other women and children went to see their men off.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Alessandra smiled. ‘My hair.’ She leaned across and rested her hand gently on Saskia’s head. ‘More fiery red, a bit like yours, when I was younger. Another superstition: meeting a red-haired person before sailing was bad luck.’

  ‘So you both lived here quite happily with your parents?’

  ‘Not so happily as we might have,’ said Alessandra. ‘Our mother died when I was eleven and my father suffered from black rages and deemed it fit to vent his temper upon his children. My brother was more biddable than I, and quarrelled less with him. I resented my father’s domination of our lives. He did not welcome visitors, did not let us meet with friends in the village. We existed to work for him, not to enjoy ourselves. As we got older I would disobey him. I loved company so much that I didn’t care what punishment he gave me, until . . .’ Alessandra paused; ‘until . . . he found the most cruel way to deal with me. For every misdemeanour of mine, he would beat Rob.’

  Saskia nearly dropped the glass she was holding. ‘How awful!’ she cried.

  ‘It was clever and effective,’ said Alessandra.

  Saskia thought of her mother, years ago, when Saskia had mentioned that she was thinking of studying biology at school. ‘That won’t please your father,’ her mother had commented. Did all parents emotionally manipulate their children?

  ‘Those were different days,’ said Alessandra. ‘It is not so long since women and children were considered to be part of a man’s property. But anyway, when I was fifteen I could go to the gutting with the other quines. During the year the herring moved all the way down the east coast, beginning in the spring when the fish lay off the Shetland Islands. By autumn they’d reach English waters. The fishing fleets would follow the shoals as they migrated. From all over the Northeast the girls would go in droves to the ports where their men’s boats would land their catch. At first my father refused to let me go. He knew that the hours the girls had to work kept them busy, but I would be away from home, and he did not want me to have any freedom at all. However, his greed for money won out, although the wages were not high. I was unskilled and I feared I would not get taken on. But May and Chris, Neil Buchan’s two sisters, taught me how to pack. They were older than me, and good teachers. I was hopeless with the knife but I learned to pack the barrels. And so in nineteen forty-six, for the first fishing after the war, off we went, following the boats down the coast to Yarmouth.’

  Saskia heard her aunt’s voice lighten.

  ‘Now, what I didn’t know was that my brother Rob, your grandfather, had met a girl some time previously when his boat had put in at Yarmouth, and he had more than fishing on his mind that year. When we met up in Yarmouth town he told me his secret and it was there that I first met your grandmother Esther, who agreed to marry him. And the next year when Rob came home in the autumn, his boat had the red, white and blue banner of the wedding flag tied to the mast to show that there was a bridegroom aboard.’

  ‘How romantic,’ said Saskia. She imagined her grandfather returning proudly to his own village at the end of the fishing season boasting about his bride, and being teased by his shipmates.

  ‘My father was furious of course,’ Alessandra went on. ‘He could not believe that the son he had thought cowed would even contemplate such a wilful thing. He raged for days about it, but in the end there was nothing he could do.’

  ‘Rob must have loved her very much,’ said Saskia. ‘That would have given him the courage to stand up to your father.’

  ‘He did,’ said Alessandra. ‘And Esther was not without her own kind of strength, for at breakfast one morning she calmly announced that if her presence was unwelcome in this house then she’d take her leave and go back home to Yarmouth, and she’d bring myself and Rob with her.’

  ‘Good for her,’ commented Saskia, proud that her grandmother was brave enough to speak up for herself.

  ‘But in truth Esther could not have done this,’ said Alessandra, ‘for her mother was a widow woman and the house overcrowded with children, but my father did not know this. He saw only that he might lose his workers so he stopped ranting for a while.

  ‘So, despite his ill will, we lived together happily, and by the year after they were married Esther was pregnant, and my brother was like a cat with two tails. Late in nineteen forty-seven there were great snow drifts between the villages, but by walking linked together we managed to struggle through to visit the Buchans on the top road and they us. And we talked and told stories and sang that bleak winter away. And my father’s dark moods and violent rages did not stop us.’

  Saskia had a picture in her mind of Cliff House covered in sparkling snow and the young men and women of the two families, Alessandra, Rob and Esther, with Neil Buchan and his sisters, gathered round the fire singing and laughing together.

  ‘There weren’t many luxuries at that time, though, were th
ere?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t miss what you’ve never had,’ said Alessandra. ‘And there was no television or glossy magazines to make us discontented.’ She paused. ‘This house has not changed very much since then.’

  Except for the company, thought Saskia. It must have been crowded and noisy; now it was subdued. She wondered if the house itself felt its loss.

  ‘The thaw came,’ Alessandra went on, ‘and with it, spring. Early in nineteen forty-eight Rob went away to the fishing again. On the day of his departure Esther was so sad she did not leave the house, so it was I who walked part of the way into Fhindhaven with him to bid him farewell.

  ‘“By the time I come home I’ll be a father, Alessandra,” he said to me. There was wonder in his voice. “Can you believe that? Me, a father?”

  ‘I remember now, I pushed him across the road in fun. “Nae,” I said. “Ye canna be a father. Ye widna ken how. Whit wid ye dae if the bairn began tae greet?”

  ‘And he laughed and said he’d call for me because I was a canny quine and I’d know what to do.’

  Alessandra had put down her knife and fork and Saskia saw that her food was getting cold but she did not interrupt.

  ‘Esther and Rob’s baby was born a little early, and came so quickly that we couldn’t get the midwife in time. Considering neither Esther nor I were quite sure of what was happening we did very well. Your grandmother was wonderful. She battled through her time with fortitude and your father arrived early in the morning, red in the face and crying his lungs out.

  ‘And then . . .’

  Alessandra stopped speaking. Saskia saw within her great-aunt the terrible calmness of great grief. She wanted to tell Alessandra not to continue if it was too distressing but found she could not speak.

  ‘And then,’ Alessandra continued quietly, ‘we waited for Rob to come home and see his baby son. Every morning we’d go to the windows in the big room at the front of the house to watch for the boats rounding the point towards the harbour at Fhindhaven. But he never came back. His boat returned all right. We saw it approaching from the headland, past the black rocks there, and we stood on the beach steps and waved a tablecloth between us, and Esther held the baby up high. And we were so happy and bursting with pride and excited to think how he’d be when he first saw his son and held him in his arms.’

  Alessandra’s voice faltered.

  ‘But it was the mission man, not Rob, who walked up the road from Fhindhaven that day. One of the villagers from the Seafarers Mission came to tell us that Rob had been washed overboard. Him and another Fhindhaven man lost their lives that season.’

  Sadness was thick within the room. Saskia blinked away tears.

  ‘At first I thought your grandmother was going to die of grief,’ said Alessandra. ‘And I thought my own heart would break too, but I remembered my promise to my brother so I put my own feelings aside and fought hard to win her back. The baby helped, he demanded attention, and when the time came for your father to be christened his mother called him Alexander.’ Alessandra raised her head and looked at Saskia. ‘Esther named her and Rob’s baby for me, because she said that without me, neither of them would have remained alive.’

  ‘So you and my father have a strong bond between you,’ said Saskia. ‘Does he know that part of his family story?’

  Alessandra shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We have never discussed it. His mother may have told him.’

  ‘My grandmother Granton,’ said Saskia. ‘I don’t remember her. She died when I was small.’

  ‘She was most beautiful. And gentle.’

  ‘Why did they go away to live in Yarmouth?’

  There was a silence in the room. Alessandra spoke eventually. ‘She was frail . . . The winters here are very bad. Her health was poor, her chest . . .’

  That night in bed Saskia read for a while and then lay down, her thoughts drifting into half-remembered places. The conversation with her father earlier in the day had upset her more deeply than she had at first realized. Greater even than the knowledge that he had lied to her was her disquiet over the unexplained reason why she could not remember her holidays here, and why they had suddenly been curtailed. Saskia sat up in bed and, as she leaned over to switch on the bedside lamp, she felt her mind rock and a small taste of queasiness crept into her mouth.

  She is on the train.

  The movement is like the sea, rocking her, swaying back and forth. She pretends she is on a boat. They are going home, home from a holiday in Cliff House. Her favourite place in all the world.

  She tells Daddy, ‘It’s my favourite place in all the world.’

  Her saying this annoys her father. She cannot understand why.

  ‘Mummy, why is Daddy angry?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘Why are you angry, Daddy?’

  Her mother’s voice, sugar-sweet. ‘Perhaps his hand is sore.’

  He glares at her mother. ‘I think it’s poisoned.’

  He unwraps the bandage. A crimson swollen gash across the palm.

  ‘You cut yourself.’

  ‘Alessandra is to blame!’ He is almost shouting. ‘The roof should have been repaired.’

  ‘Alessandra isn’t to blame that there was a storm-force gale in the summer. And she did tell you to put on her gardening gloves to handle the slates.’

  ‘It was her fault.’

  ‘Everything is always someone else’s fault with you, isn’t it?’ her mother snaps.

  ‘We won’t go back.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t do that to Alessandra. She adores the child.’

  The rocking of the train.

  They think she has fallen asleep.

  The sea did not sleep.

  Billions upon billions of eggs – herring, cod, mackerel, haddock, whiting – release into the depths of the oceans; float amongst the multitude of plankton, secrete in the tentacles of jellyfish, dribble down to settle on the ocean floor . . .

  ‘Not exactly your healthy breakfast’ – Ben smiled at Saskia’s raised eyebrows – ‘but this dockside café caters for the men who’ve been out at sea.’ He collected two plates heaped with fried potato scones, black pudding, sliced sausage and egg, and plonked them down on the table. ‘Eat up,’ he said. ‘It’s freezing out there.’

  Despite the fact that they had arrived at Peterhead docks in what Saskia considered to be the middle of the night, the harbour area was already busy. As they left the café and walked in the direction of the quayside the sky was lightening to clearest blue and she could glimpse the open water beyond the harbour walls. Saskia felt the same uplift to her spirits she’d experienced when she had jumped down from the pick-up and walked to the cliff edge with Neil on the first day she arrived.

  On an impulse she turned to Ben and said, ‘Do you ever feel different when you are close by the sea? It’s so hard to put into words. Sometimes I feel as if I’m in another space.’

  Ben nodded in agreement. ‘I think I know what you mean. If you’re very busy you can forget to take the time just to look at what’s around you, but the sea won’t be ignored.’ He spread his arms to encompass the whole quayside and then he pointed to the horizon. ‘You are drawn outwards and there is nothing between you and the sky. At times I watch the birds and wonder if they can appreciate their unique ability to defy gravity.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Saskia in excitement. ‘It’s almost like flying.’

  Ben caught her gaze and smiled.

  Saskia looked at him and saw how his eyes were dark and bright at the same time. Now don’t get any ideas, she told herself severely. You can’t cope with any more complications in your life at present.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Ben, ‘is why you decided to do economics at university. It doesn’t seem to suit you at all.’

  ‘Well, I was very unsure, and my mum and dad – well, Dad really – thought it would be a good idea. You know how it is.’

  ‘No,’ said Ben.

&n
bsp; Saskia looked away.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Ben, ‘. . . how it is.’

  ‘Um . . .’ How could she tell him? She didn’t know herself.

  As if he sensed her unease, he touched her lightly on the arm and kept chatting as they walked.

  ‘They’ve only recently built a new fish market here. The old one couldn’t cope with the volume of landings. Peterhead is the busiest white-fish port in Europe. Boats come and go all the time.’ They stopped beside some boats where the men were loading empty fish boxes. ‘These ones here have already landed their catch,’ said Ben. ‘The letters on the side are part of their registration details and let you know their home port . . . BCK is for Buckie, FR for Fraserburgh, NE, Newcastle, GY, Grimsby, and so on.’

  Saskia read out the names painted on the bows. ‘Star of Morning, Marie Hope, Sarah Ann, Frances Louise. They have such lovely names,’ she said.

  ‘Fishermen often call their boat after their children or grandchildren. Female mostly,’ Ben added.

  If my grandfather had lived, thought Saskia, I might have had a boat named for me.

  Saskia, Star of the Sea.

  ‘The boats seem so small,’ she said, ‘to be out for days in all weathers.’

  ‘They’re pretty sturdy,’ said Ben. ‘Years ago the boats could only stand a Force Five gale, now they’re out in a Force Eight. Conditions have improved, and so has safety, but it’s still the most dangerous occupation there is.’

  ‘Sounds terrifying. It’s amazing that there are so many people still prepared to go to sea.’

  ‘In a lot of British coastal towns and villages there’s practically no other source of income. Fishing is the framework which supports the whole infrastructure of these communities. But apart from that, for many of them it’s more than just a job. I think fishermen are born to it: in the heart and in the head. Even now, boys as young as ten or eleven want to go to sea with their dads. I know I did when I was that age.’

  ‘Ahhh . . .’ said Saskia. That explained a lot. ‘You’re from a fishing family?’